Aircraft

On the evening before announcing he is leaving Eclipse, Vern Raburn took another stage at EAA AirVenture with a decidedly more upbeat message. He serves on the advisory board of Icon Aircraft, a Los Angeles company that hopes to produce its A5 light sport amphibian. The Icon A5 is a two-seat, folding-wing, trailer-capable amphibian with […]

SMA (Societe de Motorisations Aeronautiques) has a solution to the effect of higher fuel prices if you operate a Cessna 182. Its answer? The SMA SR 305-230-1 diesel engine, designed and developed from scratch as an aircraft engine. The engine, STCed for most Cessna 182Qs and 182Rs, is a horizontally opposed, four-cylinder, turbocharged, air/oil-cooled, diesel […]

**** It’s been almost 10 years since Austrian manufacturer Diamond Aircraft launched its all-composite four-seater, the DA40 Diamond Star, as a follow-on to its successful but payload-limited Katana two-seat trainer. I went to the Diamond factory in Austria back then to fly and photograph the Diamond Star, though I have to admit that based on […]

If you had listened to critics sounding the death knell of the turboprop some years back, you might have thought that the Cessna Caravan would be a museum exhibit by now. Competing, as it seemed to be, against every imaginable kind of airplane-jets, turboprop twins, pressurized singles, even piston singles-how could Cessna’s big nonpressurized turboprop […]

Swiss airframer Pilatus announced it has received FAA and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) approval for its Next Generation Pilatus PC-12, to be designated PC-12 NG. The central element to the new version of the popular turboprop single is the Primus Apex avionics suite, and a new cockpit design from BMW Group DesignworksUSA. The Pilatus […]

When I wrote my flight report/review of the new Piper Matrix, I knew I would be in for some grief. Moreover–unlike in real life–this time I knew precisely what form that grief would take. The biggest complaint would be that the Matrix was an unblown Mirage. This is largely true, but it’s funny how people […]

When Piper announced back in early November that it was going to produce an unpressurized, roughly $750,000 version of its Mirage six-place pressurized piston single, the reaction from the media was, well, downright tepid. At face value it seemed as though Piper was merely trying to lower the price point of its million-dollar-plus, cabin-class, pressurized […]

It’s the calmness with which they tell the tales that’s most striking. “One time I flew unconscious for an hour and a half. I lost my oxygen from shrapnel and passed out. I came to out of gas, with the engine dead, and in a spin.” “When I got shot down the second time, I […]

The manifold pressure and propeller rpm wound down abruptly on the engine in front of me. I lowered the nose a little and continued to climb. There was no roll or yaw change, and the only pilot task was to stay on climb airspeed, the same value I had been holding before the power loss. […]

The sun is not up yet in Afton, Wyoming, and the last I checked, the temperature was reading 10 degrees. Fahrenheit. I pull on two layers of long underwear, ski pants, turtleneck, a wool sweater, two pairs of socks and the Sorel boots and huge down parka-remnants from my old Minnesota days-that I dragged out […]